Hammondal & Trust

Over on the Dice Camp, groovy questioneer luxet asked a question both compound and substantial, so I'll treat it as a mailbag entry here on ye merrye blogge. The context is Hammondal: Light of the Candle Islands, that fantasy city guide I've been working on these last couple of years, and The Hammondal Campaign, a related book I've been working on these last few weeks. I'd recently yammered a bit about that, and included this image of one of the city's 23 neighborhood maps, with numbers scribbled onto sites given entry in the guide:

Knoutside. One of 23 neighborhoods in Hammondal.

This is my development draft of a full-page, text-encrusted district map I'll eventually create, with the site-numbers doodled on by hand. This occasioned the question:

Just found myself wondering to what level of detail Hammondal is being created? I mean is every building mapped out with occupancy/use, or just a smattering of named locations (looking at numbered places here)?  Intrigued, given what I've picked up on your preference for high trust how that balances out when putting together a city? Also, will it be ready to run around it for my next campaign? ;)

The last part is the easiest to answer: Unless you're really dragging your feet on your GMing, the book probably won't be ready as your next thing to run, but it's nice of you to ask! Like Baymax, I am not fast.

The first part is pretty straightforward, too. We're definitely into "smattering" territory. Light of the Candle Islands has (in the current draft, anyway) 500 intramural entries (that is, explicit numbered sites inside the city walls) and a small handful of extramural ones (sites just outside the town proper, like the lighthouse prison run by the church, on an island out in the bay). There are approximately 4,200 buildings and other identifiable features visible within the walls of the city, so I'm only diving into about 1 in 8, with the rest left to be inferred and populated at need.

Importantly, the 500 entries won't all be "mapped out." There will be a small number (probably 5) entries that get an interior floorplan and full-fledged article, but most just get a paragraph or two of text. Most of the book's 35-ish maps will be the 23 neighborhood maps, plus that small number of interiors, plus a basic map of the Candle Islands, stuff like that. And when I say an "article" I mean, approximately, the equivalent of Blind Geoffrey's Barberie & Cauterie, which I wrote for Citybook 7 for Flying Buffalo back in the day. There will be five of those scattered through the book, highlighting a few "anchor" sites more intimately. There'll be other "breakout" articles, too, but mostly the book will be those 500 or so brief, paragraph-scaled site entries and neighborhood summaries.

That middle part, though. About trust. That's a hell of a topic. Even here, there's no time to dig as deep as it goes, but let's dig a little.

Digging into that Middle Part

How does designing for high-trust trad impact building a city, or any other gameworld? Because, make no mistake, Light of the Candle Islands is designed to be a complete, self-contained gameworld. Even if it does a big ol' flopsy-daisy and I never get to follow it up, it'll be a whole-ass thing. For that matter, the problems and opportunities described in The Hammondal Campaign take place entirely in town, or within a literal stone's throw (depending on the trebuchet, and how angry you are at that lighthouse prison). Both books are designed, from the ground up, to support HTT (high-trust-trad) play.

But high-trust design doesn't really require a specific level of detail. Not exactly. It does require certain types of detail, that I like to group into two sloppy buckets: adventure food, and character food.

In high-trust play, the facts of the gameworld are the "core rules" of gameplay. They are the enduring, reliable truths the PCs can always reference and leverage, from the existence of gravity (Hammondal comes complete with Earthlike gravity) to intimate facts like the Metropolitan's (she's kind of like the city's archbishop) open-secret love affair with an actor who plays at the Zorya (the city's most popular theater). If the PCs know about that affair (and really, everyone in Hammondal knows at least something about that affair), they can use it in some way. That's adventure food: facts the PCs can get their mitts on, and that GMs can spin scenarios around.

In high-trust play, Player Characters are tailored creations. Once the players and the GM come to some agreement about what the new campaign is about, everyone creates characters for that campaign, specifically, precisely, deliberately, with care. We make PCs to have those kinds of adventures, in this specific setting. So, if you're running a Hammondal campaign about a troupe of actors dealing with vampires being a total bummer to the theater community, everything about that foundational agreement informs who the PCs will be. They might be from wholly different cultures and be wholly different species, but they were made for this exact campaign, built from what we, as a group, understand about those cultures and species and the shenanigans we want to get up to. So, facts that serve that process of character creation are character food.

And of course, the yummiest facts can serve both roles, be both kinds of food.

Every other kind of information is filler, and filler is nothing to be proud of, so as a high-trust designer, creating Light of the Candle Islands for high-trust play, my design focus is that two-fisted food metaphor: stuff for making characters, and for using in adventures.

But ... doesn't every gameworld have information like that? Yep, pretty much, and that's why pretty much any gameworld can be great for high-trust play, but ... some more than others. The crucial distinction (that most readers will never notice) is that Hammondal is a book designed specifically for high-trust play, and that guides which facts make it into the book, which facts stay in my notes, and which questions I build the book's answers around.

And since high-trust trad adventures depend so completely on motives and values, that exerts a potent gravity on what qualifies as character and adventure food. It means we know about the Metropolitan's love life (and her standing with the Prince, and her dicey dealings with mercantile interests) because that's the kind of thing high-trust adventures need plenty of ... information that other playstyles would think of as filler, in many cases!

Which brings us back to the question of the flopsy-daisy! But, time will tell. And hey: maps!

Hammondal Echoes

Hammondal is pure game-design (with bursts of writing) at this stage, so it's harder to blog about in some ways since there's less to look at, and a lot more abstraction, and lists, and abstractions of lists and lists of abstractions (really; I do that).

The high-end supernatural stuff has taken a decidedly Slavic bent, as I always kind of assumed it might, but I wasn't really sure until it started happening on the page and in the notes. The religion stuff has gone closer to my usual GMing preferences (going back to my teenage years), and less an attempt at anything "generic" (I'm half-good at generic fantasy, but that means I'm half-terrible at it, and I'm leaning into my strengths, here). The mystery elements are gaining depth and subtlety. The military and political elements are morphing into something more tragic and less nasty (it could be that the Sunday Night Dragon Show is giving me more than my fill of nasty, so I'm leaning away from that). The mercantile elements continue to make me giggle. Now and then I poke at the neighboring towns even though they're not in the book, but because they exert gravity on things that are.

It's at its hardest to write about because I'm writing it, so there's that old writer's superstition about Talking Your Design (I may have rephrased the old superstition).

But, there are finally enough random development snapshots to post another spray of images.

Two Related Design Decisions

Today I want to ramble about two closely-related decisions in RPG design, both relating to Hammondal.

A couple of months ago, I realized that a significant portion of the city, especially among the Boranese mercantile cultures, are living puppet-people called the Mantoche, the "cloth-hearted," and other assorted slurs (some Imperials still call them Dudmen, an old name for scarecrows).

These people are, physically/visually, like the puppets of Avenue Q, or Meet the Feebles, or of course Henson, etc. Anyone who's known me for a long time will recognize that this isn't a new interest for me in a fantasy context (going back to the early days of the Blue Room and even before that) but it's just that ... some things come into their own, on their own time, and in this case, it's time to get things started.

Thematically, those who know me also know how critical "scarecrows" are to me in RPG design, and the Mantoche manage to be scarecrows on multiple levels, and I've really loved writing about them, designing their many roles in Hammondal and in the larger mysteries of the Candle Islands and of the hidden kingdoms of the Thrice-Nine Lands.

But even over the course of the last couple of months, my design intentions toward the Mantoche have changed. Initially, I was (seriously!) considering just stealthing them into 20% of the city's population, describing them in a roundabout way that could be interpreted as living puppet people ... or not interpreted as living puppet-people ... depending on the reader. I was going to imply, in a deniable way, that they are what they are.

But here I am talking openly about the Mantoche. You've perhaps caught the prior glimpses of their existence in the development snaps, but I wasn't being explicit about who they are, as I am right now.

So that's decision one. Decision two:

For a long time I had considered writing Light of the Candle Islands entirely in-voice, which is to say: entirely in multiple voices from within the game world, where every page is a translated artifact of some fictional document, shedding varied and contradictory light on the experience of the setting.

I have long since stepped back from that. While in-voice writing is an excellent way of presenting some parts of RPG design, it's not the best method I have for presenting every aspect of RPG design, and Hammondal is full-bore RPG design that needs every tool I have in the box. It'll do me no favors to force myself into constrained design as a matter of vanity.

There are a dozen reasons behind each design choice, and these two choices are pretty different, but there's one point of overlap, which is just boring old efficiency.

Writing around the Mantoche takes roughly four times the wordcount of just writing about the Mantoche, openly and directly. The direct approach lets me underline their thematic and tactical importance, and lets me get right to the fun of playing them, whether as PCs or NPCs, and there's a lot of fun to get to.

Similarly, for many crucial points about the city, an in-voice method of describing a given piece of design takes from four to eight times the wordcount of just writing it as me, as S. John, and delivering the same payload. I like my books dense with gameable material, even if that makes me more than a little old-fashioned.

These are not new lessons. Every fantasy GM who ever decided to include a pterodactyl but not come out and just say it's a pterodactyl knows the drill, and every RPG writer who loves to indulge in in-voice work does, too. Sometimes, both are worth it (Hammondal still includes in-voice sections).

Sometimes, the decisions, and exceptions, will merge. The Mantoche are, in many circles, a disrespected and distrusted minority, and that is the kind of thing that in-voice writing can express in ways that omniscient writing can't.

Anyway, like the bit about mercantile law, this is what I mean, when I talk about RPG writing and design. Hope this finds you well, and gaming.

Spin the Wheel

I have Strong Opinions on matters of fantasy cartography. No shock, I know! One of those opinions is that you should never draw to fit the paper. The way I fight that tendency (because it can be really hard not to) is I do a lot of preliminary work on a much, much larger canvas than the target output.

One of the other towns on the same island as Hammondal is called Choragus, and it's not nearly a "city" by any definition, but it's Calembour's only other seaport bigger than a fishing village, and it's got drydocks for ship repairs and shipbuilding, so despite its modest size and relative youth, it's pretty important. I'm just beginning to map it as a kind of brain-break from writing Hammondal's book. The map began like this:

Pretty humble stuff; it looks like I'm playing one of those casual videogames about building public transport ... which isn't too far off from the kind of abstract thinking on display. The red lines are major overland roads (the roads maintained and patrolled by the prince); the brown line is a secondary overland road (the kind sort-of-maintained and sometimes-patrolled by more local administrators). The blue line is the course of a river about to dump into the sea a couple of miles to the northwest.

These are just details from the Calembour map, blown up to scale and placed on a large wheel of green I call the Potter's Wheel. It's about 25 inches wide (a bit more than a mile in scale). Meanwhile, the actual final map will fit somewhere on a letter-sized sheet.

That white cross-like thing in the middle is a masking mockup showing me potential "live areas" of the final map. Neither its position nor rotation are final ... currently everything is perfectly north-oriented. But the area inside the cross shows us where the map might end up someday. Anyway after about a day it looked more like this:

I've let the phantom cross go a bit transparent so we can see more of what's going on. Now I've got a semi-final take on the natural shape of the river, and I've added a local tributary that's too minor to have appeared on the Calembour map. I've also drawn in those major roadways and it looks a bit more like a place. Then I let it sit for a couple of weeks because I was busy with Hammondal proper.

Tonight I started to really break ground (and dredge river):

I've widened the main river a bit, drawn in a couple more (local) roads and what might be a couple of town streets by the time we're done, and I've begun mapping the port and the three drydock bays (currently shown filled rather than drained because it feels clearer, but who knows how it'll go in the long run). There's also a single orange building (the river beacon), and some placeholder boats (carefully excluding any of the Boranese hull-shapes, since it's illegal for them to dock here; Hammondal has a monopoly on dealing with the Boranese).

But what this capture really shows off is the point of the Potter's Wheel: I can spin it, and I do, constantly, because another Strong Opinion I have is that you should never keep drawing from the same position relative to the map, or relative to North or any other direction, because doing so can exert a weird lateral gravity on how you see and design a town, and I don't want that ... so, (especially during the earlier stages) I constantly, randomly spin the entire map and just as often flip it (make it a mirror reflection of itself) as I work. Here, it's been returned to something nearish the north-oriented original, but visibly canted ... but I was spinning it constantly as I went.

Anyway that's the Potter's Wheel method. Eventually, as the town takes shape, I'll begin to see where it's really centered, and what it's really shaped like, and the final framing will take that into account, but until then I don't let the shape of the paper, or any specific orientation, drag the map down.

And it's just fun to spin it.

To Everything, Turn, Turn, Turn

Street-Smart in the Candle Islands

The whole point of this blog-post is to mark that I've finally got all of Hammondal's street-names in place on the master map. There are, at final count, 195 named streets (there are even more named alleyways and closes and other storied passages, but finishing all that labeling is still a big deal to me) 😄

This is what the process looked like. It's very unthrilling:

BUT ... you can't (or at least, I can't) name a thing without knowing a thing, at least a little bit, and I know at least a little bit about every one of these streets, and I really enjoy that.

Hammondal Today

I wake up each morning excited about Hammondal. I'm working on it constantly (or as constantly as asthma permits, lately) and it gives me that noisy popcorn brain where the elements are enjoying their teeny little explosions, bouncing and colliding and combining ...

And then I'd go burble happily about it on Twitter, and have that enthusiasm bled out of me by that whole "burbling happily into the void" effect. Meh.

So I'm going to let the Twitter account sleep awhile until I have the next thing to announce. In the meantime the poster-map is finalized and Hammondal posters are available at Redbubble.

To keep up with tradition, here's a mindless spew of development snaps offered without explanation or context.

Here's hoping that your enthusiasm, for whatever you're enthused by, remains undimmed.

The Game-Design Rollercoaster

The early, heady, research-heavy phase of an RPG project is, to me, the beginning of a rollercoaster ride. During that phase, I cram my eyeballs full of historical research, classic RPG works, genre research, fiddly real-world stuff like evaporation and waste from cisterns, the nature of long-term road maintenance, the precise conditions for fog, the chemistry of a peat bog, the many uses of wax, and brick. The nature of a handful of world religions, folkloric traditions, spiritual belief systems.

Just ... everything. A bit of everything that comes to mind, and everything that comes to mind after looking up the previous thing that came to mind. It's high-density brainwork and it's exciting in a chill way. And so far it's been very much that first climb, up that first hill, of the rollercoaster. CLACK-CLACK-CLACK-CLACK, a constant sense of lift, of impending possibility.

I'm now cresting that first hill, and the nature of the work begins to change, rapidly. Now, instead of accumulating possibilities, it's time to start making the choices, which is more about bringing myself into the project ... Deciding once and for all which few of these 17 imaginary cultures will step to the fore and which will step into the backdrop ... deciding which of these dozens of themes mean the most to me right now, feel the most gameable right now, feel like they've got the pulp-swashbuckly fuel to power the process over what's to come. Deciding on the balance between Stuff for the GM and Stuff for the Players. Deciding just how far I'll push the satire this time (far, very very far), and even laying down the stakes for what will become my first playtest runs.

Anyway, that's the bit where I'm at this week. Top of the first hill. Beginning to feel it in my gut that the coaster is about to drop, and the thrill of possibility evaporates in the new thrill of realization.

So that's fun.

The usual unexplained spray of development images:

Shifting Gears in Hammondal

The main "poster" map of Hammondal is complete. It'll still evolve as the book progresses, of course, but it's nice to see it all together ... or even pointedly dissected.

I've begun work on some building interior maps and accompanying exterior building elevations, and I've never drawn elevations before, so I'm at the kind-of-thrilling, kind-of-depressing "I am very very bad at this" phase with them. But, that's where I started with everything else, too, so I'm just going to draw at least one a day until I draw one that doesn't suck, and then from there I'll start really digging into what role they can play in the book. I don't consider their presence optional ... I'm spoiled on elevations from things like Pelinore, and from the WFRP line, and I regard them as an essential ingredient in this kind of book. I think I'll do nice ones, someday, after this run of awful ones.

I'll probably do some more posts about the design of the core game material in Hammondal. I've tried sparking design discussions on Twitter, but Twitter doesn't seem conducive to that sort of thing, so I might shout it more into this void, than that one. Speaking of Twitter:

I don't know if my most honest response to this is "Don't make me choose!" or "Wait ... Politics?"

Anyway, I'm also getting back to mapping the Candle Islands themselves (that's where Hammondal is), and just diving deep into the writing of the Hammondal book. That part's going much, much better than the elevation drawings ... but it's nice to mix something where my skills are confident with something where my skills are ... nonexistent. So far. But give me a few weeks ...

Hope this finds you well. Let me know what you're up to!

Das Boot

The Hammondal poster townmap is nearly done. What's preventing it from being declared a "complete draft" is boats. I've done multiple passes at "populating" the city's harbor and other waterlines with ships and boats, and each one has fallen short of my standards in one way or another. I'll keep poking at it between fontwork and other stuff. I hope to begin some of the building interior maps over the next week, and I'm excited for those! The obligatory spray of development snapshots follows, and I hope this finds you well.

Some Bullets

• This is the kind of nerdy fun I really appreciate: Scientist Uses Facial Reconstruction Technology On Skyrim Skeleton.
• Twice this past week I lost a half-hour's mapping work to software crashes, and a half-hour (an hour total) isn't a huge deal, but I've learned over the years that the only way I can get past that kind of work-loss is to re-do it completely differently, so that way it's still got the fun of discovery mixed in. So, there's an alternate dimension somewhere with two glaring differences in the Hammondal map.
• My life lesson for the day is that I really shouldn't try to eat yogurt when my beard is in "just got out of bed" mode, because my beard wants some of that yogurt, too.
• Folks with long memories may recall that Tilly's is the only clothing boutique licensed to use artwork from A Kringle in Time, in one of those classic "mall-store uses RPG art" deals we all know so well. Despite this, they are still in business. Sandra and I walked past one a few days ago (the same location we visited back when the deal came to fruition).
• I finally snagged a copy of Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind when Steam had a good sale on it. I only 35% bought it because it uses one of my Gelio fonts for the logo. I also got it because I really liked King of Dragon Pass when I finally played it on Android a few years ago. If you've never tried either, they're basically Management Sims with a strongly atmospheric fantasy-narrative presentation and lots of the gameplay deliberately tucked under the hood. Good stuff.